Biographies of Women Mathematicians

Karen Uhlenbeck

August 24, 1942 -

Karen Uhlenbeck graduated from the University of Michigan in 1964. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis
University in 1968 with a thesis on "The Calculus of Variations and Global Analysis." Uhlenbeck has made "pioneering contributions to global
analysis and gauge theory that resulted in advances in mathematical physics
and the theory of partial differential equations." [MAA Focus].
She has taught at
MIT, Berkeley, the University of Illinois in both Champaign-Urbana and Chicago, and since 1988 has held the Third Sid W.
Richardson Foundation Regents' Chair in Mathematics at the University of
Texas. She was a MacArthur Fellow in 1983, and has been elected to the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences (1985) and the National Academy of Sciences (1986). On
December 1, 2000, she received a National Medal of Science for "special recognition by reason of [her] outstanding
contributions to knowledge" in the area of mathematics. She
has also served as Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society. In
1990 she became only the second woman (after Emmy Noether in 1932) to give a
Plenary Lecture at an International Congress of Mathematics.

Uhlenbeck is a co-founder of the IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute and the program for Women and Mathematics in Princeton. In 2007 she received the AMS Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Mathematical Research for her foundational contributions in analytic aspects of mathematical gauge theory that appeared in two papers in the Communications in Mathematical Physics in 1982. You can read her acceptance speech from her home page at the University of Texas.

Read a reprint of Karen Uhlenbeck's
Personal Profile that appeared in the MAA Math Horizons.

References

Profile from The Noether Lectures: Profiles of Women in Mathematics,
AWM,
http://www.awm-math.org/noetherbrochure/Uhlenbeck88.html.